outside and inside mumbai, a city from its guides

COLLECTION PREMISE

Our understanding of urban landscapes is innately shifting on a perceived premise of the kind and amount of data availability from and about it. We present our views about the city by what we are told what it is and how it should be experienced. A city, as an urban condition becomes a medium to express ourselves and see us as both creators and consumers of content, which gets defined as the city in essence making a city what it is, how we know it. The city’s image is relative to the amount of intelligence we associate to it. It was impossible at least for a given time to comprehend an urban landscape in its entirety due to various content discrepancies. Since there weren’t enough resources to gather all that information and if gathered the limitation of the book then required dissemination of the collected material restricted as per constraints of the format. A city guidebook is a record of an era and time, earmarking what it was to gather content in pursuit of navigating a geography.

Places, spaces, artefacts and events are collected to form a guide on the city. Instead of city as a whole we are shown parts of it, to locate ourselves and using these bits then to move about an area earmarked as an urban agglomeration. In memory of the guide as an instrument on urban intelligence the Mumbai Guidebook Collection is assembled. As act, the collection is a sporadic exercise and to state a method would be on basis of sources from where objects of the sets are acquired from. A collection may or may not contain objects of similar characteristics but possess an ideology towards factors leading to common relational assemblage. In these cases, objectives of gathering are conditions of bringing unrelated things to an identified interactive state. The goal of this collection is to assemble a list of information sources popular in organising and disseminating a type of city dataset, in this case its cultural data. Culture is an elusive term having myriad connotations to its description as such. To layout in part a guideline for an explanation this collection was amassed.

WORK DONE WITH THE FIRST DRAFT

The urban guide is in general the first benchmark to state ideas of a culture on a region. Though of a specific type here notions of urban culture get compiled on the foundation of things in the city where one can mostly play or in other terms find access to entertainment. Status of collection indicated as an initiating draft formed an information set to locate cultural precincts within city limits. Area concentrations then resulted in an inquiry of factors to have resulted in its development both in reference to information as per documents sourced against local planning norms. Though not always of the highest standards most material represented approximate a definition of the city’s cultural geography. With each variant of the guidebook there is a reproduction of the notion of what the city culture can take form into based on what are viewpoints made available within an identified document narrative. A city guide enables the recreation of the city.

PHYSICAL GUIDES

Since material gathered was systematically accumulated and compiled over a period of time, there was a requirement to record this aspect of a research work. Thus this assimilation of the document set presented as such. Pursuits of compilation began with a subscription of Timeout Mumbai around and about 2011-’12. Visits to newspaper stalls, thrift shops and bookstores further add to the process where found are items which claim or is considered as city guides. A result of these visits becomes the physical guidebook collection. It could be stated that it locates itself to a contemporary document set thus resulting in knowledge base of a contemporary nature _ A collection of popular city guides. Time of publication on most documents would range from the late 1990’s to the present up until 2013. There has been a persistence to cover most sources available locally. Hence anything beyond local purchase is overlooked. Independent and private publishing that don’t sell in public access locales too hasn’t been considered. This is one section of the set where the book as object irrespective of format is pursued.

VIRTUAL PLATFORMS

As collection, the document set isn’t particularly a classical collection but a hybrid list or an archive of references. The reason for that being all objects in the set isn’t necessarily available at hand but readily accessible parts are physical and remaining virtually accessed. Some are static and other evolve or could disappear in time. Particularly is the case of online sources and urban tours where guide as a collectible is definitely brought to question. Presence of the virtual guides alongside traditional print editions is reference to a state in urban exploration at the onset of the internet era. Possibility in exploring this condition was assisted by an over whelming number of mapping services such as Google Earth to have launched in the recent past and prepare avenues for alternate methods of urban navigation. Websites in the business of city information dissemination becomes another participating in providing material in intelligent city navigation. Though not a convention the newspaper too plays a role in guiding to moderate accuracy how a fabric is going to play out, therefore as an instrument adds to the broader dataset of city guides. Slotting with the virtual bunch is a result of convenience owing to the fact several newspapers have ready access to their online archives either free or at a price.

QUESTIONS

When a specific information set is compiled, its few potentials to become innately apparent are identification of patterns within the content and possible avenues to realign so as to present an alternate reading. Its principally an exercise in dismantling and reassembling to create another interpretation of ideas which the source content is known to promote. The second draft of this collection is distinctly reworked in two parts meaning the same measure of content observation will be applied against content in two distinct format types. Following are a possible set of questions to direct a possible investigation in a part of the collection. These are purely stochastic queries to pose and potentially revised during the course of an investigation. The ambiguity recognised here requires a note in a larger concept wherein irrespective of the perceived randomness of an anticipated study, a city and its objects should present itself as being mutually exclusive at the same time interdependent.

Can collections lead to any distinct observations, which otherwise may be missed? If there are biases in collections will it impact the reading of tabulated results? What form is an ideal city guidebook? What are the distinct parts of a city geography as described by the guide? After observing a presented format of the collection and method of content dissemination can it possibility be reconfigured with the addition of new information? Is there a new argument available in looking at the city and its collection of guides from a period in time? What is the idea of landscape and its objects one is looking for when navigating a city? How do you observe and navigate the city in the age of data? How is the guidebook format instrumental in restructuring the notion of what the city is via its several buildings, sites, places and processes?What does a Mumbai collection say about the city?